


But in the Chinese drawing-room

by caseykaboom



Category: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU, Crossover, M/M, POV Second Person, POV Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 15:29:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3176814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caseykaboom/pseuds/caseykaboom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's you and him: it's you, and Tony, <i>contra mundum</i>.</p><p>[Brideshead Revisited AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	But in the Chinese drawing-room

1.

You are sitting on the edge of the fountain smoking, the expansive Brideshead behind you and the unwavering driveway in front. It is summer: the sun is just rising: the scent of roses and lilac swells in the air. Beyond the forecourt and the hill’s crest, through the wrought-iron gates and the twin lodges, you watch as Natasha drives away, her luggage behind her and not a backwards glance at the great house that she and Tony call home. Tony alone now is in charge of Brideshead: all of his family away for the summer: and you his guest. As Natasha’s car disappears from view you feel a sense of liberation and peace that you do not know you will feel again, years later, during the war, when the sirens sound the “All Clear” after a night of unrest.

Tony swims up to you in the shallow fountain and rests his head against your leg, naked and white and fishlike, his arms sputtering water onto the driveway and his hair staining your clothes wet. “We’ll have a heavenly time alone,” he says: you look at him smiling, and he smiles fondly back, eyes crinkling and teeth flashing and fingers tracing the seam of your trousers. You pass him your glass of wine: your kiss tastes sweet as the Chateau Peyraguey and the fat Turkish cigars, and the alpine strawberries stain both of your lips red.

2.

You were summoned to Brideshead by a telegram that read: Gravely injured come at once Tony. As she drove you from the station the Lady Natasha asked if you had taken the first available train: you had. During your travel fear fermented in you images of disaster, a carelessly held gun, a car at a blind corner, a submerged stake in the lake, even a homicidal maniac swinging a length of lead pipe; as the cornfields and heavy woodland sped past in the golden evening you nearly threw up in worry and agitation, the throb of the train-wheels repeating monotonously: _you’ve come too late. You’ve come too late. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead._

“How is he,” you asked, in twilight, at the end of the local line, feverish with anxiety.

“Tony? Oh, he’s fine. Have you had dinner?” said Natasha.

In the gathering dusk she explained that he had cracked a bone in his foot, “so small it hasn’t a name,” and had to keep it up for a month. “I expect he thought you wouldn’t come if you knew,” she said gently, and you understood it to be her apology: you were meant to be angry at Tony. You are not angry at Tony. With the rush of relief –  exasperation that he would crack a bone in the height of the summer – tenderness that he wrote for you and worried whether you would come for him, for you would have gone anywhere for him – you were the exact opposite of angry.

So it was that Natasha deposited you at Brideshead, in the twinkling stars and the scented air – “well, darling, I’ve collected your chum,” to Tony, and then to you: “don’t let him boss you about so much. It’s very bad for him,” and in the morning she went.

3.

“Do you remember how we met,” you say, you are sitting under a high elm far enough from the house that what you are sketching is mostly from memory. As you outline the windows you think of your ground floor room at Oxford: the deeply recessed windows, the painted, eighteenth-century paneling, and the purple gillyflowers below them, which on summer evenings filled them with fragrance. You suspect that it was the gillyflowers that drew Tony to your window, that night when you first met: you, entertaining blearily your crowd of Hodges and Coulsons, and him, stumbling back to the dorm with his crowd of Hammers and Stones: both of you unhappy, both of you feeling trapped, both of you vaguely fearing and faintly hoping that this was not all that Oxford – all that the world – had to offer. It was an unpropitious meeting: your window was open, Tony was drunk, and as (you suspect) he was drawn to the gillyflowers he looked at you with unfocused eyes and threw up on your floor.

Even at that time, when you did not know Tony than by reputation and his large teddy-bear (Jarvis, you knew even then), you thought that there was a kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Tony’s choice, in his extremity, of an open window.

“I remember,” Tony mumbles to your stomach. It is near noon: the cicadas are screeching: there is hardly a breeze and you are sweating through your shirt in the sparse shade. Tony is lying on dirt and thick knotted roots and whispy grass, his head buried against your thigh, and you don’t know how he is comfortable. “Jarvis is still cross with me for it,” he says.

“I’m sure he’s not,” you say. You slide a hand in his damp hair and look back at your sketch of Brideshead: you rub off the smooth lines of the marble sills shouldering the ground floor windows, and draw in blooming gillyflowers.

4.

On the second day you woke up to Tony’s breath against your ear, his stubble on your neck, his free foot tangled with yours and the sheets neither of you bothered with in the night. “Nat’s leaving,” he whispered: “We could hide in here until she clears out.” He was hopeful.

“I’ll go say good-bye,” you said. You yawned: it was just light: you could smell the orchids opening through the open window. You stretched out your muscles before putting on clothes, before helping Tony with his, before helping him down the stairs, where he hobbled with a pantomime of difficulty. You paused at the bottom of the staircase, where the darkness would end when you push open the door: Tony was two steps above you, yawning: you embraced Tony’s head with your hands and he bent to let you kiss his crown, his fingers tightening on your shoulders to keep balance, muttering about good orchids for your buttonholes and warm figs for breakfast.

5.

“It says here that you’re supposed to spit the wine out after tasting it,” you say, swatting Tony on the shoulder. Tony squeaks: watches you take your wine: leans over and holds your lips with his, until you forget everything and swallow your wine, too.

“Ought we to be so happy _every_ day?” Tony asks against your lips.

“Yes, I think so.”

“I think so too.”

6.

You have been to Brideshead once, on a peculiarly splendid day: the bowls of tulip bowing with rainwater from the night before, the air filled with the scent of magnolia, the bells ringing high and clear. Discordantly Oxford was thick with tourists, families and children eating bad cafeteria foods and clambering down narrow halls, the front quad of your dorm floored and tented for some event in the evening. In the midst of the chaos Tony entered your room in a crisp linen shirt and a tie that didn’t match his jacket – your tie, as it were. “What in the world’s happening in your dorm? Is there a circus?” he said, and, “you’re to come away at once, out of danger,” and thus abducted you to Brideshead, in a motorcar that he didn’t own.

That was your third term since enrollment: but you date your college life from your first meeting with Tony, in the middle of the term before. As Brideshead was coming into view, through the cottages and the village greens, Tony pointed vaguely to it and said: “that is where my family live.” You thought it ominous then, the words he used: not, “that is my house”, but “that is where my family live”. You think again of the morning Natasha drove away, much too early and much too quickly, her hair blowing back as Tony’s did: in this way and many others the two siblings are alike.

7.

Your sketchbook fills with pictures of Brideshead: in the sun; the garden front and the fountain; the pillared hall leading to the library; the view from the Chinese drawing-room, where you spend nearly every evening of the perfect summer. It lay on the side of the house that overlooks the lakes; the windows are open to the stars and the scented air, to the indigo and silver, moonlit landscape of the valley and the sound of water falling in the fountain.

“You must paint a mural here,” Tony rumbles against your ear: his arms slip around you: his lips and beard graze your cheek. So you do: you clear a medallion in the small office on the colonnade, pick a romantic landscape from your sketchbook, and fill it out on the wall in colour. Tony curls by your feet: drapes on the railing of the narrow window: passes you a wrong brush, or a wrong tin of oil paints, or a glass of champagne when you do not ask for one, and your suits smell of lead and spilled champagne and Tony’s hands.

8.

“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy,” Tony says, his gaze on the glittering lakes and yours on his profile, blue-grey smoke trailing from his lips to the open window. “And then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”

9.

You line up your cock to Tony’s hole, the barest hint of pressure, and you swear you can feel his pulse on your cock. It is night: the golden candlelight sways casts long shadows across the attic. Tony spasms, his asshole clenching and slipping on your head, and you have to grip the base to not come right then and there. You slide in slowly: you palm his ass like two halves of a peach and kiss the hair on his legs and the arch of his feet. The air smells like fermenting grapes and heavy cream on the verge of spoiling, and you love this man so much it hurts, it hurts under your nails, it hurts in your teeth, it hurts in the roots of your hair.

“Tony,” you whisper, your cock throbbing in his ass and his drooling onto his stomach. You look at Tony: his hair spilling on the pillow, his mouth open, his nipples shiny with your spit and the prettiest pink you’ve ever seen, his long fingers holding his legs open: holding himself open, like a present, like an offering, to you.

“Steve,” he gasps, he looks directly into your eyes and smiles like you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to him and you’re gone, you’re gone, you’re gone.

10.

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Jarvis in a good temper...” Tony sighs into your chest, his fingers in yours losing grip, his eyes slipping shut. You grumble something in reply: as your skin dries you feel the hairs on your body fluffing up: you are already asleep.


End file.
